The 21 Best Horror Books of the 21st Century

Grady Hendrix is building a brand: gimmicky on the outside, surprisingly scary on the inside. Horrorstör, his 2014 horror breakthrough, plopped readers into a haunted faux-IKEA full of torture instruments—beyond what the real-life stores already stock. His follow-up, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, dials back the meta-factor; aside from the yearbook-style packaging, this tale of ‘80s gal pals dealing with a demonic intrusion could easily a have been a paperback original during horror’s boom period—and that’s a compliment. Abby and Gretchen are best friends for life on the eve of the first Bush presidency…until Gretchen gets lost in the woods and comes back different. Abby, already an outcast in her swank private school, faces as much peer pressure as she does pea soup in her quest to cleanse her best friend’s soul. —Steve Foxe

Bird Box by Josh Malerman2015

With your eyes closed and your imagination unfettered, you can envision creatures whose monstrosity knows no bounds. Detroit-based author Josh Malerman manifests an apocalypse of the obscured in Bird Box, in which undiscovered entities start appearing around the world and just one glance of their grotesquery drives people to suicide. In the book’s unforgettable introduction, our protagonist travels down a river with black fabric knotted around her eyes, shepherding two similarly blinded four-year-olds, rowing their way to an uncertain sanctuary while any sound they hear could very well be one of these monsters sloshing ever closer to the bow of the boat. —Jeff Milo

A Choir of Ill Children by Tom Piccirilli2003

The titular phrase “a choir of ill children” is used four or five times throughout the late Tom Piccirilli’s haunting Southern Gothic, first in reference to the off-kilter musicality of protagonist Thomas’ three brothers (conjoined at the head) speaking in unison. Thomas, the heir of Kingdom Come’s most prosperous family line, enjoys an equal mix of fear and respect in town, from the granny witches in the swamps to the compulsively nude preacher’s son to the sheriff nursing a mighty Napoleon complex. If that sounds comedic, that’s because there is a perverted sense of dark humor punctuating the novel’s scenes of shocking violence and grotesquery. Like the great Michael McDowell and Karen Russell, Piccirilli mines his southern setting for the full range of the region’s complicated, messy magic. —Steve Foxe

Coraline by Neil Gaiman2002

You’ve got to hand it to Neil Gaiman: he excels when it comes to assembling an enticing fantasy/adventure lark that turns dark. This modern day Alice In Wonderland starts out quite charming, with the precocious Coraline Jones and her parents moving into a mansion full of quirky flat-mates and a talking cat. But the stakes rise when a monstrous entity masquerading as Coraline’s mother kidnaps the girl’s real parents, leaving Coraline to rely on the assistance of eerie allies in the ghosts of children ensnared by the spell of “Other-Mother.” The grotesquery levels peak particularly high on the scare-o-meter for horror fans when Coraline has to figure out (and eventually fight) her way to conquering this intensely fearsome foe. —Jeff Milo

The Devil in Silver by Victor LaValle2012

Victor LaValle cites Shirley Jackson as an influence, and that lineage is easy to identify in this literary piece that’s as much about institutional failings as it is about the bison-headed devil wandering the halls of a mental institution. Pepper, the novel’s protagonist, can’t quite recall the crime he (supposedly) committed, but he knows he was only supposed to be held in New Hyde Hospital for a few days at most. LaValle wrings dread out of Pepper and his fellow inmates’ helplessness, sticking to Jackson’s level of unease instead of attempting all-out terror. By the end, the reality of the titular devil is almost ancillary to the horror that’s been revealed. —Steve Foxe

Fellside by M.R. Carey2016

M.R. Carey—better known to comic readers as former Lucifer and X-Men scribe Mike Carey—is poised to gain legions of new fans once the film adaptation of his praised The Girl With All the Gifts hits stateside. The novel, which puts a new spin on [mild spoiler] the zombie genre, is stellar, but not as genuinely scary as his follow-up, Fellside. The elevator pitch is “Orange is the New Black with a ghost,” but Carey lives up to his initialed namesake M.R. James in constructing the haunting, near-gothic atmosphere of a British women’s penitentiary inhabited by more than the living. For Jess Moulson, accused child-killer, the ghost may be her only ally in a fight for survival against the prison’s more aggressive residents—and her quest to do right by the spirit layers on surprising twists until the very end. —Steve Foxe

A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay2015

In this Bram Stoker Award-winning tale, author Paul Tremblay (whose next outing, Disappearance at Devil's Rock, is absolutely chilling if a bit baffling at the very end) manages to both examine the possession subgenre and break new ground with its tired tropes. Fourteen-year-old Marjorie Barrett starts displaying signs of schizophrenia, or maybe it’s just teenage rebellion…or maybe it’s something more. Before long, Marjorie’s out-of-work father agrees to let a reality-TV crew film an attempt to exorcise his daughter’s demons. Cutting between the events of the show and an interview with Marjorie’s younger sister, filmed 15 years after the show’s conclusion, Tremblay walks a razor-thin edge between confirming and denying which forces are actually at play within Marjorie’s head, keeping readers guessing well after the final page is turned. —Steve Foxe

Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill2007

Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box remains one of the most startling horror debuts in recent memory, announcing the arrival of an all-time great scaremonger. The premise should be grounds for immediate ridicule—a past-his-prime rock star orders a ghost off of eBay—but Hill shapes the laughable pitch into a breakneck tale of terror. Judas Coyne is the rare horror protagonist that grows more likable as he fights to survive, reckoning not only with a chilling spectre but also with his own checkered past. —Steve Foxe

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski2000

Arriving at the turn of the new millennium, House of Leaves seemed, for a brief moment, to herald a new dominion of horror, told in nesting stories with footnotes, endnotes, sections in code, colored clues in the text and other formal experiments. Author Mark Z. Danielewski has apparently moved on to more impenetrable works, though, and few have taken up his complicated call to arms. But if you take the time to cut through the Infinite Jest-like structure of Danielewski’s doorstopper, you’ll be rewarded with a legitimately unsettling premise: the family in the story within the story has moved into a house that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. What slowly unravels from this disconcerting discovery makes for a disturbing—and literal—descent. —Steve Foxe

John Dies at the End by David Wong2009

Horror and comedy make for frequent yet not always compatible bedfellows, with the latter genre often hogging the pillows. David Wong’s John Dies at the End combines Cronenbergian disgust with stoner humor as the titular John and his bud Dave discover Soy Sauce, a drug that exposes its users to a parallel dimension. Wong, who cut his teeth writing for Cracked.com under his real name, never loses sight of the horror side of the equation, ratcheting up the gonzo comedy to make the existential dread all the more pervasive. The sequel, This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It, makes for a fun follow-up, especially if you’re a fan of zombie media. —Steve Foxe

Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist 2004

John Ajvide Lindqvist gets compared to Stephen King a lot (some editions of his work have King’s name repeated more times on the covers than Lindqvist’s), but Sweden’s reigning horror king has a depth of terror and emotion all his own. Let the Right One In, known to wider audiences thanks to both the Swedish film adaptation and the American remake, Let Me In, is as much a story of adolescent isolation as it is the defining modern work of vampire fiction (sorry, Twilight). Bullied preteen Oskar isn’t just frightened when teens in his small town start ending up dead—he’s excited, believing that vengeance has finally come to his tormentors, potentially in the form of a mysterious girl who has moved in next door with a suspicious older man. And while both films are worthy takes on Lindqvist’s story, Let the Right One In truly sings when given nearly 500 pages to breathe. —Steve Foxe

Lisey’s Story by Stephen King2006

Stephen King is fairly infamous for crafting protagonists who just happen to be bestselling authors with beautiful wives, but it wasn’t until 2006’s Lisey’s Story that King gave the wife a turn in the spotlight. Lisey’s Pulitzer Prize-winning husband has been dead for two years when her story begins, but his ghost (metaphorically) haunts her. At the prompting of a nosey academic, Lisey finally sorts through her husband’s remaining papers, revealing secrets even a 25-year marriage couldn’t uncover. Much of Lisey’s Story, written as a sort of love letter to King’s wife, Tabitha, reads like a non-genre domestic drama, which makes the moments of horror—and romance—that much more affecting. —Steve Foxe

The Missing by Sarah Langan2007

It’s a bit of a shock whenever Sarah Langan makes a modern-day reference in 2007’s The Missing; the novel feels so purely derived from the stomach-churning legacy of the ‘80s horror boom. Langan, who nabbed Bram Stoker Awards for this novel and 2009’s Audrey’s Door, sets her story of a looming cannibal apocalypse in a familiar state for horror fans—Maine—constructing vignettes around schoolteachers, hospital workers and librarians piecing together that something is happening. Langan never nails down the source of the plague—there are suggestions both scientific and supernatural—but she certainly knows how to ratchet up the tension. Those seeking a happy ending or purely likable characters need not apply. —Steve Foxe

NOS4A2 by Joe Hill2013

If Heart-Shaped Box is notable for deftly avoiding Stephen King’s overt influence, NOS4A2 marks the point at which Joe Hill embraced his father’s quirks—and emerged all the better for it. Arriving after the solid, compact and not particularly scary Horns, NOS4A2 revs its engines in a nostalgic opening that quickly turns into The Christmas Chain Saw Massacre. When Vic McQueen hops onto her bike, she has a special way of finding things. When Charlie Manx gets into his vintage Rolls-Royce, he’s able to transport his young passengers to “Christmasland.” And when the two collide after Vic becomes the first child to escape Charlie’s yuletide hellhole, Hill unravels more than 700 pages of pure horror. —Steve Foxe

The Passage by Justin Cronin2010

The Passage is often misrepresented as merely a vampire novel—or a zombie novel or a post-apocalyptic contagion novel—but it’s so many things at once. Terrifying throughout its suspenseful crescendos, it combines the disorientation of 28 Days Later, the life-or-death urgency of The Walking Dead and even some of the supernatural dazzle of X-Men. As the start of a trilogy, its scope is admittedly grand; this book chronicles 90 years in which colonies of healthy humans must fight against infected humans turned vampyric. The Passage boasts a meticulous attention to detail, effectively raising heart-rates as we follow characters who are being hunted by man and monster alike. —Jeff Milo

Savaging the Dark by Christopher Conlon 2014

Christopher Conlon’s all-too-possible Savaging the Dark shares a premise with Alissa Nutting’s controversial Tampa, but the differences in execution are what makes this novel truly horrific and Nutting’s more of a pitch-black comedy. Conlon’s narrator, Mona Straw, slowly unravels while carrying out an affair…with her 11-year-old student. Whereas Tampa introduced an admitted predator from the first page, Conlon takes care to build a believable case for how Mona justifies her taboo actions, even as her control of the situation—and her sanity—slip out of her grasp. Of all the novels on this list, Savaging the Dark may be the scariest if only because of its plausibility. —Steve Foxe

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes 2013

While horror has always flourished on the small-press scene, Lauren Beaukes is helping to forge a continued legacy for the genre at major publishers as well. The Shining Girls is a serial killer novel unlike any other, as Harper Curtis discovers a house in Depression-era Chicago that opens its doors to other times—and comes with a kill list of “shining girls” destined to die at his hand. Kirby is the last name on the list, and the only one who survived Harper’s first murder attempt. As in her exceptional follow-up, Broken Monsters, South African novelist Beukes weaves together a diverse cast of characters and just enough science fiction to complicate her premise without distracting from the horror at hand. —Steve Foxe

The Summer is Ended and We Are Not Yet Saved by Joey Comeau 2014

Joey Comeau’s first horror outing, One Bloody Thing After Another, is perhaps creepier and more unsettling than this summer-camp slasher. But The Summer is Ended and We Are Not Yet Saved gets the nod for importing the genre from film into prose while layering in subtle, smart commentary on our thirst for teen blood. Eleven-year-old Martin is used to entrails—his mother does special-effect makeup for horror movies—but would like to keep his inside of his body. A maniac employed at his bible camp has other intentions. The title of Comeau’s previous novel would have worked here just as well: the gory killings are one bloody thing after the other, stacking up as a reminder that we’ve created a prolific genre around watching kids get murdered in inventive ways. —Steve Foxe

The Terror by Dan Simmons2007

From Song of Kali and Carrion Comfort to a host of sci-fi classics, Dan Simmons is no stranger to lengthy literary outings. But the last decade found the author hitting his stride with immersive historical horror fiction, the best of which is the story of the HMS Terror’s failed search for the Northwest Passage. While most of the horrors awaiting the ship’s crew are all-too-real—shrinking rations, scurvy, bitter cold—there’s a looming supernatural presence driving the survivors farther from civilization and any hope of rescue. —Steve Foxe

Under the Dome by Stephen King2009

This may be a controversial pick—you could make a strong case for the overly sentimental Doctor Sleep, the half-great Revival or even the totally decent Duma Key—but this hefty story of a town cut off from the world by a mysterious invisible force field is pure King. At his best, the prolific scribe puts a magnifying glass to ordinary people’s reactions to extraordinary situations, and finding your community trapped with itself certainly qualifies as extraordinary. Rather than haunted hotels, vampires or extra-dimensional clowns, Under the Dome relies on the darkest impulses of humanity to conjure its scares. —Steve Foxe

World War Z by Max Brooks2006

So many of our favorite zombie romps stay within a narrowed scope, like zombies in a shopping mall or zombies in a bioengineering laboratory. The scariest part comes after, when we imagine what a zombie plague will mean for the rest of the world. Max Brooks expanded his scope to the entire globe, telling his hauntingly realistic story as though it were a United Nations commissioned report following a war against the “walkers.” World War Z demonstrates that it can be infinitely disturbing to gain chapter-sized surveys of zombie-infested locations by way of interviews with a diverse cast of characters. The image of walking corpses wading their ghastly way across depths of the sea floor will haunt you. —Jeff Milo

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My Best Friend’s Exorcism by Grady Hendrix2016

Grady Hendrix is building a brand: gimmicky on the outside, surprisingly scary on the inside. Horrorstör, his 2014 horror breakthrough, plopped readers into a haunted faux-IKEA full of torture instruments—beyond what the real-life stores already stock. His follow-up, My Best Friend’s Exorcism, dials back the meta-factor; aside from the yearbook-style packaging, this tale of ‘80s gal pals dealing with a demonic intrusion could easily a have been a paperback original during horror’s boom period—and that’s a compliment. Abby and Gretchen are best friends for life on the eve of the first Bush presidency…until Gretchen gets lost in the woods and comes back different. Abby, already an outcast in her swank private school, faces as much peer pressure as she does pea soup in her quest to cleanse her best friend’s soul. —Steve Foxe

Bird Box by Josh Malerman2015

With your eyes closed and your imagination unfettered, you can envision creatures whose monstrosity knows no bounds. Detroit-based author Josh Malerman manifests an apocalypse of the obscured in Bird Box, in which undiscovered entities start appearing around the world and just one glance of their grotesquery drives people to suicide. In the book’s unforgettable introduction, our protagonist travels down a river with black fabric knotted around her eyes, shepherding two similarly blinded four-year-olds, rowing their way to an uncertain sanctuary while any sound they hear could very well be one of these monsters sloshing ever closer to the bow of the boat. —Jeff Milo

A Choir of Ill Children by Tom Piccirilli2003

The titular phrase “a choir of ill children” is used four or five times throughout the late Tom Piccirilli’s haunting Southern Gothic, first in reference to the off-kilter musicality of protagonist Thomas’ three brothers (conjoined at the head) speaking in unison. Thomas, the heir of Kingdom Come’s most prosperous family line, enjoys an equal mix of fear and respect in town, from the granny witches in the swamps to the compulsively nude preacher’s son to the sheriff nursing a mighty Napoleon complex. If that sounds comedic, that’s because there is a perverted sense of dark humor punctuating the novel’s scenes of shocking violence and grotesquery. Like the great Michael McDowell and Karen Russell, Piccirilli mines his southern setting for the full range of the region’s complicated, messy magic. —Steve Foxe

Coraline by Neil Gaiman2002

You’ve got to hand it to Neil Gaiman: he excels when it comes to assembling an enticing fantasy/adventure lark that turns dark. This modern day Alice In Wonderland starts out quite charming, with the precocious Coraline Jones and her parents moving into a mansion full of quirky flat-mates and a talking cat. But the stakes rise when a monstrous entity masquerading as Coraline’s mother kidnaps the girl’s real parents, leaving Coraline to rely on the assistance of eerie allies in the ghosts of children ensnared by the spell of “Other-Mother.” The grotesquery levels peak particularly high on the scare-o-meter for horror fans when Coraline has to figure out (and eventually fight) her way to conquering this intensely fearsome foe. —Jeff Milo

The Devil in Silver by Victor LaValle2012

Victor LaValle cites Shirley Jackson as an influence, and that lineage is easy to identify in this literary piece that’s as much about institutional failings as it is about the bison-headed devil wandering the halls of a mental institution. Pepper, the novel’s protagonist, can’t quite recall the crime he (supposedly) committed, but he knows he was only supposed to be held in New Hyde Hospital for a few days at most. LaValle wrings dread out of Pepper and his fellow inmates’ helplessness, sticking to Jackson’s level of unease instead of attempting all-out terror. By the end, the reality of the titular devil is almost ancillary to the horror that’s been revealed. —Steve Foxe

Fellside by M.R. Carey2016

M.R. Carey—better known to comic readers as former Lucifer and X-Men scribe Mike Carey—is poised to gain legions of new fans once the film adaptation of his praised The Girl With All the Gifts hits stateside. The novel, which puts a new spin on [mild spoiler] the zombie genre, is stellar, but not as genuinely scary as his follow-up, Fellside. The elevator pitch is “Orange is the New Black with a ghost,” but Carey lives up to his initialed namesake M.R. James in constructing the haunting, near-gothic atmosphere of a British women’s penitentiary inhabited by more than the living. For Jess Moulson, accused child-killer, the ghost may be her only ally in a fight for survival against the prison’s more aggressive residents—and her quest to do right by the spirit layers on surprising twists until the very end. —Steve Foxe

A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay2015

In this Bram Stoker Award-winning tale, author Paul Tremblay (whose next outing, Disappearance at Devil's Rock, is absolutely chilling if a bit baffling at the very end) manages to both examine the possession subgenre and break new ground with its tired tropes. Fourteen-year-old Marjorie Barrett starts displaying signs of schizophrenia, or maybe it’s just teenage rebellion…or maybe it’s something more. Before long, Marjorie’s out-of-work father agrees to let a reality-TV crew film an attempt to exorcise his daughter’s demons. Cutting between the events of the show and an interview with Marjorie’s younger sister, filmed 15 years after the show’s conclusion, Tremblay walks a razor-thin edge between confirming and denying which forces are actually at play within Marjorie’s head, keeping readers guessing well after the final page is turned. —Steve Foxe

Heart-Shaped Box by Joe Hill2007

Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box remains one of the most startling horror debuts in recent memory, announcing the arrival of an all-time great scaremonger. The premise should be grounds for immediate ridicule—a past-his-prime rock star orders a ghost off of eBay—but Hill shapes the laughable pitch into a breakneck tale of terror. Judas Coyne is the rare horror protagonist that grows more likable as he fights to survive, reckoning not only with a chilling spectre but also with his own checkered past. —Steve Foxe

House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski2000

Arriving at the turn of the new millennium, House of Leaves seemed, for a brief moment, to herald a new dominion of horror, told in nesting stories with footnotes, endnotes, sections in code, colored clues in the text and other formal experiments. Author Mark Z. Danielewski has apparently moved on to more impenetrable works, though, and few have taken up his complicated call to arms. But if you take the time to cut through the Infinite Jest-like structure of Danielewski’s doorstopper, you’ll be rewarded with a legitimately unsettling premise: the family in the story within the story has moved into a house that is bigger on the inside than it is on the outside. What slowly unravels from this disconcerting discovery makes for a disturbing—and literal—descent. —Steve Foxe

John Dies at the End by David Wong2009

Horror and comedy make for frequent yet not always compatible bedfellows, with the latter genre often hogging the pillows. David Wong’s John Dies at the End combines Cronenbergian disgust with stoner humor as the titular John and his bud Dave discover Soy Sauce, a drug that exposes its users to a parallel dimension. Wong, who cut his teeth writing for Cracked.com under his real name, never loses sight of the horror side of the equation, ratcheting up the gonzo comedy to make the existential dread all the more pervasive. The sequel, This Book Is Full of Spiders: Seriously, Dude, Don't Touch It, makes for a fun follow-up, especially if you’re a fan of zombie media. —Steve Foxe

Let the Right One In by John Ajvide Lindqvist 2004

John Ajvide Lindqvist gets compared to Stephen King a lot (some editions of his work have King’s name repeated more times on the covers than Lindqvist’s), but Sweden’s reigning horror king has a depth of terror and emotion all his own. Let the Right One In, known to wider audiences thanks to both the Swedish film adaptation and the American remake, Let Me In, is as much a story of adolescent isolation as it is the defining modern work of vampire fiction (sorry, Twilight). Bullied preteen Oskar isn’t just frightened when teens in his small town start ending up dead—he’s excited, believing that vengeance has finally come to his tormentors, potentially in the form of a mysterious girl who has moved in next door with a suspicious older man. And while both films are worthy takes on Lindqvist’s story, Let the Right One In truly sings when given nearly 500 pages to breathe. —Steve Foxe

Lisey’s Story by Stephen King2006

Stephen King is fairly infamous for crafting protagonists who just happen to be bestselling authors with beautiful wives, but it wasn’t until 2006’s Lisey’s Story that King gave the wife a turn in the spotlight. Lisey’s Pulitzer Prize-winning husband has been dead for two years when her story begins, but his ghost (metaphorically) haunts her. At the prompting of a nosey academic, Lisey finally sorts through her husband’s remaining papers, revealing secrets even a 25-year marriage couldn’t uncover. Much of Lisey’s Story, written as a sort of love letter to King’s wife, Tabitha, reads like a non-genre domestic drama, which makes the moments of horror—and romance—that much more affecting. —Steve Foxe

The Missing by Sarah Langan2007

It’s a bit of a shock whenever Sarah Langan makes a modern-day reference in 2007’s The Missing; the novel feels so purely derived from the stomach-churning legacy of the ‘80s horror boom. Langan, who nabbed Bram Stoker Awards for this novel and 2009’s Audrey’s Door, sets her story of a looming cannibal apocalypse in a familiar state for horror fans—Maine—constructing vignettes around schoolteachers, hospital workers and librarians piecing together that something is happening. Langan never nails down the source of the plague—there are suggestions both scientific and supernatural—but she certainly knows how to ratchet up the tension. Those seeking a happy ending or purely likable characters need not apply. —Steve Foxe

NOS4A2 by Joe Hill2013

If Heart-Shaped Box is notable for deftly avoiding Stephen King’s overt influence, NOS4A2 marks the point at which Joe Hill embraced his father’s quirks—and emerged all the better for it. Arriving after the solid, compact and not particularly scary Horns, NOS4A2 revs its engines in a nostalgic opening that quickly turns into The Christmas Chain Saw Massacre. When Vic McQueen hops onto her bike, she has a special way of finding things. When Charlie Manx gets into his vintage Rolls-Royce, he’s able to transport his young passengers to “Christmasland.” And when the two collide after Vic becomes the first child to escape Charlie’s yuletide hellhole, Hill unravels more than 700 pages of pure horror. —Steve Foxe

The Passage by Justin Cronin2010

The Passage is often misrepresented as merely a vampire novel—or a zombie novel or a post-apocalyptic contagion novel—but it’s so many things at once. Terrifying throughout its suspenseful crescendos, it combines the disorientation of 28 Days Later, the life-or-death urgency of The Walking Dead and even some of the supernatural dazzle of X-Men. As the start of a trilogy, its scope is admittedly grand; this book chronicles 90 years in which colonies of healthy humans must fight against infected humans turned vampyric. The Passage boasts a meticulous attention to detail, effectively raising heart-rates as we follow characters who are being hunted by man and monster alike. —Jeff Milo

Savaging the Dark by Christopher Conlon 2014

Christopher Conlon’s all-too-possible Savaging the Dark shares a premise with Alissa Nutting’s controversial Tampa, but the differences in execution are what makes this novel truly horrific and Nutting’s more of a pitch-black comedy. Conlon’s narrator, Mona Straw, slowly unravels while carrying out an affair…with her 11-year-old student. Whereas Tampa introduced an admitted predator from the first page, Conlon takes care to build a believable case for how Mona justifies her taboo actions, even as her control of the situation—and her sanity—slip out of her grasp. Of all the novels on this list, Savaging the Dark may be the scariest if only because of its plausibility. —Steve Foxe

The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes 2013

While horror has always flourished on the small-press scene, Lauren Beaukes is helping to forge a continued legacy for the genre at major publishers as well. The Shining Girls is a serial killer novel unlike any other, as Harper Curtis discovers a house in Depression-era Chicago that opens its doors to other times—and comes with a kill list of “shining girls” destined to die at his hand. Kirby is the last name on the list, and the only one who survived Harper’s first murder attempt. As in her exceptional follow-up, Broken Monsters, South African novelist Beukes weaves together a diverse cast of characters and just enough science fiction to complicate her premise without distracting from the horror at hand. —Steve Foxe

The Summer is Ended and We Are Not Yet Saved by Joey Comeau 2014

Joey Comeau’s first horror outing, One Bloody Thing After Another, is perhaps creepier and more unsettling than this summer-camp slasher. But The Summer is Ended and We Are Not Yet Saved gets the nod for importing the genre from film into prose while layering in subtle, smart commentary on our thirst for teen blood. Eleven-year-old Martin is used to entrails—his mother does special-effect makeup for horror movies—but would like to keep his inside of his body. A maniac employed at his bible camp has other intentions. The title of Comeau’s previous novel would have worked here just as well: the gory killings are one bloody thing after the other, stacking up as a reminder that we’ve created a prolific genre around watching kids get murdered in inventive ways. —Steve Foxe

The Terror by Dan Simmons2007

From Song of Kali and Carrion Comfort to a host of sci-fi classics, Dan Simmons is no stranger to lengthy literary outings. But the last decade found the author hitting his stride with immersive historical horror fiction, the best of which is the story of the HMS Terror’s failed search for the Northwest Passage. While most of the horrors awaiting the ship’s crew are all-too-real—shrinking rations, scurvy, bitter cold—there’s a looming supernatural presence driving the survivors farther from civilization and any hope of rescue. —Steve Foxe

Under the Dome by Stephen King2009

This may be a controversial pick—you could make a strong case for the overly sentimental Doctor Sleep, the half-great Revival or even the totally decent Duma Key—but this hefty story of a town cut off from the world by a mysterious invisible force field is pure King. At his best, the prolific scribe puts a magnifying glass to ordinary people’s reactions to extraordinary situations, and finding your community trapped with itself certainly qualifies as extraordinary. Rather than haunted hotels, vampires or extra-dimensional clowns, Under the Dome relies on the darkest impulses of humanity to conjure its scares. —Steve Foxe

World War Z by Max Brooks2006

So many of our favorite zombie romps stay within a narrowed scope, like zombies in a shopping mall or zombies in a bioengineering laboratory. The scariest part comes after, when we imagine what a zombie plague will mean for the rest of the world. Max Brooks expanded his scope to the entire globe, telling his hauntingly realistic story as though it were a United Nations commissioned report following a war against the “walkers.” World War Z demonstrates that it can be infinitely disturbing to gain chapter-sized surveys of zombie-infested locations by way of interviews with a diverse cast of characters. The image of walking corpses wading their ghastly way across depths of the sea floor will haunt you. —Jeff Milo

Last year, Paste brought you our picks for the 30 best horror novels of all time, but let’s be real: not everyone wants to read the dense prose of Dracula and Frankenstein in 2016 (even if the classics are totally worth reading). And with legendary scribes including Stephen King, Clive Barker, Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson casting their immense shadows, throwing out such a wide net often results in passing over more recent gems in favor of time-tested standards.

With that in mind, Paste is proud to present our picks for the 21 best horror novels of the 21st century, just in time for Halloween reading. It’s worth acknowledging that the list is very white and very male—while authors like Alyssa Wong and Emily Carroll are tearing up the short fiction and comic worlds, the novel-length arm of the genre appears slow to diversify. We hope that the next roundup we compile will more fully represent the genre’s passionate readership. With that in mind, click through the gallery* for the best house-haunting, serial-killing, spine-chilling horror of the new millennium.